Today was a good day. I woke up at 5:30, showered, ate some cereal, and sat down to play some starcraft until class at 9. I began with a series of ZvP and ZvZ on various ladder maps, clearing them all in decisive victories on pretty balanced maps, Metal/Xel/Scrap. After 5 wins I was still feeling pretty baller as normally I can manage a nice 60/40 with regards to win/loss until "it" happened.
I rolled ZvP. On Steppes. If you are a zerg player you will know what I mean by "it". "It" is the one match up that you know will kill you. "It" is the map that makes you want to Alt+QQ. "It" is a confidence killer and a ladder spree ender. In short, "it" is something you don't want to happen. The only thing that could really add to my negative feeling was the fact that I was streaming my laddering to around 80-100 people at the time.
Don't get me wrong, I love streaming. What I don't love is streaming a game that I feel, that I know, will make me pissed off. I know that if that happens I will probably start banning some people who may not deserve it in the chat, people who obnoxiously type "u gut roop3d lololol" and etc, and that will make me look like a big douche. Either way, I was in this situation where I was playing a protoss on Steppes. "Calm down," I told myself, "the worst he can do is 4gate you, so just prepare an early defense so if he pushes you can defend it. If he doesn't push early and instead expands you can use that early amount of units to get map control and do a little poking while expanding. The key is to..."
Essentially you can see how this was going, I was going to prepare and use my superior, as I always believe, macro to smash this nubsawce protoss in to oblivion.
I began the game with a pretty standard build order in mind, I was going to go for a 14 pool for fast speedlings, scout to see if he was going to try and zealot/sentry push me or if he was going for stalker/zealot etc. If he was going to go any sort of zealot based build I was going to get fast roaches and defend, then expand. I end up sending my first scout out and steal his gas. Normally I do 2 cancels on my scout drone/extractor so I can get myself two "rounds" of scouting in but I ended up forgetting. "No big deal," I told myself, "you just have to make sure to poke his front with some lings to check his army status."
I continue doing my regular build, getting a roach warren for some roaches, and my macro starts to fail. After a small ladder session I usually find myself in a situation where I forget some random thing that costs me the game, in this case I was forgetting ovies, and I usually lose. Normally I lose simply because I feel like I am SOOOO behind that there is no way I can come back, but this time I simply told myself; "There are a bunch of nerds watching you stream right now, if you leave or lose because of your attitude you are going to look like a mighty large prick. Get your head in the game and get on it."
So I send some lings around the map to scout for any dumb proxy bull and scout his ramp with a ling. I notice two zealots in his choke which isn't too large of a deal but it does confirm to me that he has a plan for early aggression. Knowing this I start to get myself an army, probably could have put up some spines, and get ready for his attack. My map awareness allows me to know that he is starting to move out with a heavy zealot/sentry mix and I start to think to myself, "Pssh, really? I got this shit brohamster!"
He engages, I get a surround with my lings so I can attack with my roaches effectively, he kills my lings but I take out a lot of his units. At this point I am feeling pretty baller status so I throw down an expansion. I then realize that I should do a small poke just to get a hint at what kind of defense he has and, lo' and behold, I delay his expansion and force him to turtle in his base. At this point I know I am at a lead on him and I know he knows that I am in the lead. So I do what many great people in the sc2 community have said; after I get ahead, I get aheader. I expand, get my economy up and running, and use my army for map control/defence. He then decides to do a small push to test the waters and ends up over committing, losing a lot of stalkers and an immortal to my roaches.
I feel pretty comfortable but I decide to get some speedlings in my army as well as teching to lair. Once there I decide that going roach/hydra/corrupter would be best on this map because the primary engagement zone is quite large. I start building an army and getting a bunch of hydras in the mix because I know he has a stalker/immortal ball at the moment and hydras are imbaimbagosux2 against that mix. I know, at this point, that I am behind economically but I am also safe, so I decide to pump drones and get my economy going. I go for my third because I scout that he is destroying his rocks that lead to his third and also use my overseer to corrupt his robo bay. I know that I need to get corrupters asap if I do not want to die to his colossus so after I get my third started I begin the spire.
I do notice that I am getting supply blocked but I make sure to tell myself that I can still win this, getting supply blocked happens to the best players and they still manage to pull off a win. But, oh shit, he decides to move out before I have enough corrupters. This is mostly due to my macro really starting to fail, I don't get enough drones QQ. I still manage to, somehow, hold it off. I kill a few collosus and he retreats.
I start to refresh my army with a lot of roaches but ack! He attacks my third! I have more corrupters this time so I am easily able to pick off his colossus and my roaches+hydra are enough to kill the ground forces. He is forced to retreat but actually ends up leaving his colossus behind! I get myself a free, and probably critical, colossus kill without sacrificing a single corrupter. I then say to myself, "Alright, that is the second army of his that you have defended and this time he lost a lot of colossus. It will take him a long time to rebuild so what I need to do is push and try and take the win. If I can't take the win I need to at least put him far enough back that I can expand again and get more drones."
I send a scout ling to the watch tower that he took from me to make sure that he didn't steal anything silly like the gold and decide that my army is of significant size that attacking now is a very good idea. I move up the middle only to find that his army is waiting for me! He doesn't notice in time and I am able to snipe a few sentries and zealots. He retreats, I continue to push, I snipe a colossus with my corrupters, he retreats more, and I see that his army is maybe a half of mine and mine hard counters his.
I push, and know that I have just won.
This win was pivotal for me because I have such a hard time on this map, and an even harder time in ZvP on this map. In the title I put big in quotation marks not because this is some tournament win, but because this is personally a large win for me. If you have any experiences similar to this, please post them. I always love to hear a good success story.
I hope that this post was legible and enjoyable to those that could make it through the entire thing :D.
EDIT: QQ, it won't keep my indentations for the beginnings of paragraphs, sorry! Double edit: I just added an extra space, hope it makes it easier to read!
Protip: put in pictures if you can, or at least make paragraph spacing (skip lines), so it's easier on the eyes and also is more organized! Unless it's stream of consciousness narrative or something of that like.
I'm reading right now anyway, though! :3
Edit: ah saw your edit, but skip lines in between anyway keke Double edit: LOL thanks
Wow, nice game! :3
I play toss, so when whenever I played on steppes vZ, I had the opposite mindset, haha... Race fanboyism aside, you seem to have a really good thinking process as you play. The reason my mechanics are so bad is that I sort of blank as I play but am an exceedingly good strategist when I'm watching others (easy to say, of course, but I instinctively know what to do whenever I'm NOT playing, whether it's over the shoulder of someone, or on a stream).
Very nice read man, both well written and well played. I could feel myself in the story, fighting hard for a ZvP win against imbatoss =D Keep writing battle reports if you have more memorable games! Your style is pretty fun and easy to read.
Well written, its a good thing getting over a fear of a MU on a map. Once I was scared of PvT on LT, but now I realise how to take advanage of the map.
Just keep laddering, keep observing opponent styles and finding counters and you will be masters in notome.
GL Husky in the future.
Edit: After reading the end of the OP, i do have one pretty epic game, even if it was quite a while ago (it was when i was promoted to platinum, that long ago.)
PvZ on Metal. At this point with me playing I still didn't have a good PvZ build/opener so I was just doing whatever. I went for some kind of a gate core gate build. I used my scouting probe to build a probe in his base (his first 6 lings just decided to run past it). I had not put my zealots on hold position, and he got a few lings into my base. I cleaned that up with a few probe losses.
After defending this I went into a bit of a panic, after losing probes. I make a few more zealots as well as a stalker. Yet again, I forgot to put my zealots on hold position, and about 16 lings run into my base. They kill all but 4 of my probes, so I really start panicing. I thought that if he got more lings into my base I would lose.
I finally remembered to put my zealots on hold position on the ramp. He just kept sending lings at me, and i finally started deflecting them with zealots on the ramp. While all this was happening, i warped in about 6 zealots at the pylon I had made in his base (he was still on one base, lol gold league). I don't know what he was doing, but all his lings were at the middle of the path between our bases (I was at the 6 position, him at the 8. The zealots killed all but a couple of his drones, and he left. I felt so awesome that I won even though my econ was in ruins.
For me, it was a TvP on LT. I'm a firm believer that macro wins games, so I practiced only one build: 2rax FE (the only TvP build I know to this day). And it worked beautifully, crushing any immortal build, gateway-based army, or FE build. Then I hit the wall -- around 2200 diamond (2 months ago), I found myself losing every TvP match for a week straight to the same build over and over again: the fast 2-3 colossus timing attack.
My usual habit of analyzing my replays didn't help much -- all I saw was that warpgate gave toss an inherent army advantage from the early-mid game on, so I had to bunker up until my 2nd base macro kicked in, but then he would have 2-3 colossus by the time that happened and he would wreck through my 2-3 bunkers with range & force field. I lost so many TvP straight for a whole week that I slowly became convinced that 2-3 col was the "hard counter" to 2 rax FE ... no matter the map or the position, it seemed the attack came too early for me to do anything about it.
Seeking inspiration, I went back to the source of my 2rax FE build: Select. I carefully pored over every game I could find of his, analyzing every single unit and building built and every single tactic he used. I discovered to my delight that there were 4 things that every TvP he 2-rax FE'd had in common that I had not yet incorporated into my play: concussive shell timing, stimpack timing, medivac timing, and viking timing. For the brief 30-60sec that each upgrade/new tech unit completes, Terran has a brief window to deal damage while taking relatively little in return -- a brief army efficiency advantage that must be taken advantage of. I realized all my 2-rax FEs were way too passive -- I was only able to defeat prior opponents on sheer macro mechanics. I had to incorporate a new skill-set to defeat this 2-3 col timing attack.
But even with this new found knowledge, I found myself still losing TvPs. Despite the small amounts of advantageous damage I was able to do with each small efficiency timing window, I still found myself getting crushed by the inevitable 2-3 col timing attack -- I still couldn't get vikings out in time, or I couldn't mass enough bio army to overcome the efficiency of 2-3col + sentry.
But I didn't lose hope! Because this time, when I analyzed my replays I saw many things to improve upon -- my macro often slipped during my timing attacks, which ultimately delayed my eventual viking production. Further, I saw my toss opponents' macro would sometimes slip during these little attack pokes I did, providing another source of skill-based advantage for me.
Determined, I looked forward all the more to TvPs so I could further refine my execution. Then came that fateful game -- a TvP on LT, close air position. I started the game strong -- the toss had lost his first stalker to my marauder's ensnare, and thus satisfied I retreated to establish my expo while I used the occassional scan to keep tabs on his army tab and expo timing.
My stim finished as I moved out with 6 marauders 6 marines, throwing a quick scan at his choke to see what units I could snipe. Beautiful -- an immortal and sentry in the front of his ball, and the rest of his sentries in the rear. If I could snipe the first sentry, I'd be in the clear to snipe the immortal and then quickly back away from the choke before any units get trapped by forcefields. The execution -- went perfectly as planned.
I knew at this point I was slightly ahead in army count even with warpgate mechanic, but I still feverishly macro'd my ass off, knowing the 2-3 col timing attack was still coming, only slightly delayed. My fingers felt loose, all my commands were flowing in a smooth rhythm, and everything just felt right. I was nailing every supply and production cycle, my building placement was good, I had just enough gas for every upgrade and next tech, my scans and mules were on time, I was in complete control of my base and I knew exactly what was coming.
To be honest, I have a hard time remembering what happened after that. All I can recall was that I had more than enough vikings and a huge bio army that completely crushed his 2-3 col timing attack to the point that I was able to win the game right then and there. What I do remember so vividly was the exhiliration of knowing that I had just played what I considered to be a perfect game, and had beaten the "hard counter" to my 2 rax FE build with plain good old macro and execution after weeks of countless consecutive defeat.
Afterwards, I quickly checked the avg unspent resources tab (as is my usual habit), and couldn't believe my eyes: 380 -- a world of a difference vs. my usual 550-600 avg unspent on 2 rax FE. Admittedly I haven't played much in the past 2 months, but I haven't gotten anywhere close to that ever since.
EPT
